Stelvio Pass Bike Ride – Switzerland, August 28, 2009
This picture scared the bejesus out of me: a 100 km ride with a sustained 2300m (7,545.91 ft) climb as its centerpiece.
The Classic Stelvio Pass Postcard
In January, I had spoken to my friend Ruedi and he had suggested that we do the StelvioBike ride in Switzerland on Saturday August 28, the day before a scientific seminar in Bremen Germany and, coincidentally, the one day this year that the pass is closed to auto traffic. In my mind, this outing took the form of a quick little detour to Switzerland during a planned biz trip to Germany. With a typically-compromised, US-centric view of European geography, this seemed perfectly reasonable to me. With a work-centric, typically-compromised training program to prepare for such a ride, this also seemed somehow possible to me. What the hell…why not?
Of such stupidity are true adventures born!
Web sites devoted to the Stelvio scared me enough that, mercifully, one reality did in fact sear itself into my brain. The ride was big enough that I would need to train…at least a bit. In typical-Ken fashion I tortured myself, thinking about the thousands of dollars I would need to part with to get a suitable road bike. I shopped. I kept picking out the top-of-the-line bikes…and not buying them. A neighbor and friend, Jeff, put me out of my misery by selling me one of his many used bikes (allowing him to outfit a sweet new ride!).
Logistics! I ended up having to fly to Switzerland from Korea. SFO, Korea (see previous Jeju Island post), Frankfurt, Zurich. Drive with Ruedi to the Swiss Alps…dinner with his friends…do the ride. Get back to Zurich. Jump on a plane. Go to Germany.
The morning that I was leaving Korea, I found out that Ruedi had crashed on his mountain bike and broken his collar bone. He was clearly sidelined and I thought (with a certain sense of relief) that the Stelvio was over for me before it had even started. Hey – I had got a road bike and I had trained a bit, so it had not been a complete waste! When I spoke to him in person, Ruedi took a somewhat different approach to his injury – all the plans had been made, he said, and I “might as well” do the ride on his bike. Celise provided similar encouragement.
So I arrived in Zurich at about midnight on Thursday night, rented a car, Stayed the night. Friday – Ruedi spared me having to navigate Zurich to find his home – he brought his bike to my hotel. I loaded it up and drove through the Alps (Davos, Flualapass, Zernez…) to the SMALL town of Cinous-Chel on Friday, and had a delightful dinner with Ruedi’s friends.
Bridge on the way to Davos
I woke to persistent rain the next morning (again thinking with a less-certain sense of relief that this might mean the ride was off…). Defying the weather, I followed Ruedi’s friends south toward the darkening skies of the Italian border to Santa Maria, Switzerland, with wipers running the whole time. We mounted up and rode. We crossed into Italy and descended to Prato, 500m elevation. In Prato, the “biking buzz” was palpable with hundreds of cyclists making their way to the Stelvio Pass road. French, German, Spanish, & Italian were spoken by the riders around me and were clearly visible on club attire. All of a sudden, we made a right turn and the next bit of downhill on the road before us was atop the Stelvio Pass, 26 km ahead. This is an uninterrupted climb of 2260m…something like 7,500ft…with an average grade of about 11% (max 14%). The ride climbs a fabled series of 48 hairpin turns as it ascends relentlessly up a ridiculously steep Italian hillside. I decided early on that survival was a good theme for the day – I just needed to not panic, stay focused, and pedal consistently all the way to the top. That is exactly what I did, stopping only very occasionally to snap some pics. Here they are:
The first of 48 notoriously steep switchbacks
Climbing into the clouds and rain - relentlessly UP
Scenic - toe of the glacier behind the clouds
Steep series of switchbacks
STEEP! (did I mention that it was steep?)
Up and up and up and up and up...
26 km, 7500+ ft and more than 2 hours later - THE SUMMIT
Freezing - time to descend
After the summit, the road tips down the other side and falls back down to Santa Maria in one long, steep descent. We met at a restaurant after, shared a heifeweizen and a soup and went our separate ways – them back to Cinous-Schel for more riding the next day…me to Zurich, and a 7AM flight the next morning to Frankfurt, Bremen and the International Mass Spectrometry Conference.
I won’t say that this was fun. Too many complicated logistics and no Ruedi. But it is a great thing to have done. Once!
Ruedi provided some scenic pics from previous years’ rides when the weather had been sunny and warm:
Clear day - glacier
Looking up at the climb to the pass
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